I'm going to imagine a time in which post-internet megabucks are really rolling in, and I'm equipped with a private Rhizome Vistajet. If that time happened to be this week, I’d be sure to hit up these exhibitions and events, ranging from Katja Novitskova and Timur Si-Qin's upstate New York exhibition to Robin Peckham's new art fair excursions in Hong Kong. Check out the upcoming exhibitions listed below, with a couple outstanding shows not to be missed. “Bcc 9: Das Ei ohne Schale.” at Oslo10, Basel, SwitzerlandOpening Thursday, May 10th at 7PM.Is Bcc the new BYOB? Oslo10, a new exhibition space in Kunstfreilager/Dreispitz, just outside of Basel, Switzerland, will host the ninth edition of Bcc. Originated by Aurélia Defrance, Julie Grosche and Aude Pariset, who have also curated this edition, the exhibition format mandates that all artists submit their work digitally, rather than physically. Artists in this round include Harm van den Dorpel, Calla Henkel and Max Pitegoff, Stephen Lichty, Sara Ludy, Mélodie Mousset.Kate Steciw, “Live Laugh Love” at The Green Room, LondonOpening Friday May 11th at 6:00pm, runs through June 17Surprisingly, this is Kate Steciw’s (much belated) first exhibition in Europe. Green Room programmer Ché Zara Blomfield seems to be aggressively bringing the work of American “internet-related” artists to London, her last exhibition mounting the work of Artie Vierkant, and previously showing Petra Cortright.

Rhizome Benefit – New York, NYMay 9th at 7pm, VIP Cocktails with a silent auction and DJ set by Venus X, 9PM, Afterparty with LE1F and Extreme AnimalsAlright, this is a shoo-in, but come party with us! Support Rhizome, drink some drinks, and enjoy ...

The verdict from Frieze New York? Not so bad! While the city has experienced a rash of yawn-worthy art fairs — this year's Armory no exception — yesterday saw the impressively successful debut of Frieze Art Fair on New York's Randall's Island. Combining mainstays such as Gagosian with younger, more innovative galleries such as 47 Canal, T293, and Balice Hertling, Frieze NY offered a crowd-pleasing multifaceted, international approach. Some stand-out works below.

While I'm familiar with Rhodes' installation work through a recent solo exhibition at Metro Pictures in New York, this collages proves his two-dimensional work to be much more pared down and sensitive to detail. Rhodes, who splits his time between Berlin and New Orleans, has gathered materials around both of his studios, using spraypainted reliefs of New Orleans flora as a background to this composition. Although the most satisfying details of the piece are lost in this jpeg, Rhodes further layers his collage with text from Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, "'Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent.' -- Judge. GO OUTSIDE."

Keltie Ferris, "(*)", 2012 at Mitchell Innes and Nash

On view at Mitchelle Innes and Nash's booth is Keltie Ferris' large, graffiti-inspired paintings. While the term "graffiti-inspired" alone may be enough to turn many a viewer off, Ferris' paintings seem timely, and dare I say, internet-aware. With titles that frequently employ various combinations of punctuation marks, Ferris' paintings appear at once almost pixelated or digitally inspired as well as cognizant of delicate position that abstract painting occupies in 2012.

Joan Heemskerk and Dirk Paesmans, collectively known as
JODI, are rightfully venerated for their countless contributions to art and
technology, working as an artistic duo since the mid-90’s. Generally referred
to as pioneers of “net.art,” that oft-misunderstood “movement” combining the
efforts of artists using the internet as a medium circa 1994, JODI is revered not
only for their artistic meditations on the increasing presence of new technology
in our daily lives, but also for their fuck-if-I-care attitude toward both the
establishments of the technology and art worlds. JODI’s famous five-word
“acceptance” speech—if you could call it that—for their 1999 Webby Award in
art, simply read, “Ugly commercial sons of bitches.”

Unlike an overwhelming majority of artists, and especially
those in art and tech, JODI has managed to sustain a successful career for over
15 years, mounting exhibitions internationally. February 2011 saw the duo
literally blow its audience in the face with bomb-like cans of oxygen at Foxy
Production, accounting for one of the best performances of the year.

Yet, their recently launched exhibition at the Museum of the Moving
Image (MoMI) finds a flashy, overly simplistic exhibition that
fails to represent the deeply important perspective that JODI has come to
represent over the last two decades. Comprising work made from 1999 to the
present, “Street Digital” extends JODI’s focus from the desktop computer to
hardware’s broader, more public landscape including cellular phones, LED signs,
and iPods. A projection split into four channels, YTCT (Folksomy) (2008/2010),
combines Youtube videos of “people doing weird things with hardware,” or more
specifically, the video features mostly-teenage boys destroying old iPods,
cameras, laptops, etc., by throwing, bashing, or hammering them. Periodically,
a legitimately strange occurrence replaces the usual simple, hormonally charged
violent acting-out of an enfants terrible ...

Having appeared as a recurring character on
various reality television shows such as “Frank the Entertainer,” would you
consider reality television to be an artistic medium that you work through? If
so, are there any important attributes specific to it? Were you interested in
reality television due to the wide audience that it could offer your work?

“Medium” is
a tricky word here because most other media bear the ability to become a craft
to an artist, one you can mold, shape and learn to use better and better over
time. Reality TV is more like a grab bag. You never know what’s going to
happen. So, if it is a medium, it is not a medium that you, as an artist, are
ever really in control of. Someone else is calling the shots--the producers, storywriters
and editors.

I currently
think of reality TV more like a landscape, in which I can appear and reappear
in different places in various ways.

I went on “Frank
the Entertainer…In a Basement Affair” to just be this anomaly. To get the
non-art audience who might see me to scratch their heads for a minute and say
“Hey what is this girl doing here? I’m used to seeing girls that look and act
like X on these shows.” And then, after I sang the dirty rap song, which was
completely incongruous with the woman I had been portraying up to that point,
to have audiences see that I was not who they thought I was—that none of the
girls on these shows are.

Building on the last question related to
reality TV, are there some instances on air in which you’re mainly acting, and
others in ...

Paradoxically, exhibiting artists that rage against the institution within the institution is both non-ironic and particularly vogue. Unlike the institutional critique of the late 1960s and 70s, which had the exceedingly explicit dynamic of the artist versus institution, those roles today have become less clearly defined. Consider Creative Time, the New York based public sculpture non-profit headed by Nato Thompson and Anne Pasternak, which has recently extended its brand to support the occupation of other institutions as an institution itself. Thompson and Pasternak called for the take-over of the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Lent Space last December in an open letter posted on occupyartnyc.org, signed also by art world professionals, listing their institutional affiliations beside their names. And how could one forget the sophomoric hullabaloo surrounding Take Artists Space last October, in which artist Georgia Sagri botched an occupation of the Soho nonprofit Artists Space, all the while admitting that powerful commercial galleries such as Gagosian would be a better target for their concerns, though less sympathetic to their efforts than non-profits. Sagri is now included in the upcoming Whitney Biennial. How an artist negotiates contextualization as fuck-it-all raucous, while cosmopolitan and strategic enough for institutional recognition remains to be seen.

Institutional critique dates back to the late 1960s and 1970s when both government and private support of American public institutions existed on a different plane than it does today. The NEA’s annual budget peaked in 1992 at $176 million, and thanks to the “culture wars” of that period, is about half of that today considering inflation. Offering both historical and contemporary perspectives coming from the lineage of institutional critique is Spies in the House of Art, recently opened at the Metropolitan Museum. (The exhibition’s press release erroneously states that the show begins with the dawn of artists working with the subject of the museum, which they locate in the 1980s, though that would likely make Belgian institutional critique pioneer Marcel Broodthaers roll in his grave. It also purports to study the “secret lives of museums,” which sounds better as a movie tagline than a curatorial thesis.) Nevertheless, the juxtaposition of the more aggressive work of institutional critique greats such as Andrea Fraser with the less full-on work of younger artists such as the British filmmaking duo Nashashibi/Skaer illustrates how thoroughly conversations surrounding institutional critique have become neutralized, which is arguably due to the recent passing of art world power from museums to galleries acting as international chains such as the aforementioned Gagosian.

Thomas Struth, The Restorers at San Lorenzo Maggiore, Naples, (1988)

For her 1989 video “Museum Highlights: A Gallery Talk,” Fraser dons the character of the upper-class museum docent Jane Castleton, who bears a striking semblance to Parker Posey’s yuppie, catalog-shopping, Starbucks-loving character Meg Swan in “Best in Show.” Castleton guides us around the Philadelphia Museum of Art with a running commentary on the obvious class differences of several works...